About 240 million years ago, the only supercontinent that made up the Earth, Pangea, began to fracture due to the progressive distance of the tectonic plates until forming the current atlas of five continents. It is a known story, beyond any scientific doubt, but what was not known until now is that this continental drift experienced sudden accelerations, as revealed by a study published in the journal Nature .
“It is the equivalent of moving like a pedestrian to riding in a BMW,” Dietmar Muller, a geophysicist at the University of Sydney, Australia, and co-author of the work, told The New York Times. Muller himself admits that they do not yet know why the speed of movement increases up to twenty times!
After analyzing the history of seismic movements on our planet in the last 240 million years, scientists have discovered that the continents moved away from each other at two different rates: little by little and in jerks. According to his digital simulation, this is what happened at the origins of Pangea’s disintegration, when North America and Africa went different paths . At first, for forty million years, they were one millimeter apart each year, and suddenly the average skyrocketed to twenty millimeters per year, the rate at which our nails grow.
This escape lasted ten million years, before returning to the previous calm rhythm. The same pattern was repeated in the “divorce” of India and Madagascar, Australia and Antarctica, Europe and Greenland, and South America and Africa.
The conclusions of the study and the simulation have been made available to the public on the internet.
